Take A Closer Look At Satya Nadella, Who Could Become Microsoft's Next CEO

Satya Nadella is one of the leading internal candidates to become the next CEO of Microsoft, having spent 21 years at the company, rising sharply in power in the past few years, as part of Steve Ballmer’s brain trust.

This week, he traveled to Paris to the Le Web conference do an onstage interview with Gigaom’s Om Malik.

We’ve found the video of the interview and posted it below. If you’ve never seen Nadella in action, this interview shows him off to good effect.

Unlike Ballmer’s straight-from-the-hip style, Nadella treads carefully with his words. For instance, he comes close, but never actually admits that Microsoft has stumbled in key areas, like mobile computing:

“You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes your not, but it’s the average that counts,” he said in the interview.

He currently heads up Microsoft’s cloud computing efforts. Under him, the unit’s revenue grew to $US20.3 billion in the fiscal year that ended in June, up from $US16.6 billion when he took over in 2011, reports Bloomberg’s Dina Bass and Marie Mawad.

He’s also known internally as someone that’s good at getting warring factions to work together, Bloomberg reports.

That’s an important trait for the new CEO since shortly before announcing his resignation, Ballmer reorganized Microsoft to try to get business units to cooperate better. He even named the reorg “One Microsoft” (and crafted it with the help of Ford CEO Alan Mulally, known for doing the same at Ford).